by Willa Hart
The Spark of the Dragon's Heart
Harem of Fire Book 1
Willa Hart
Contents
About This Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Afterword
Excerpt from The Heat of the Dragon’s Heart
About the Author
About This Book
One human girl. Five scorching hot dragons. A thousand reasons hate them. None of those reasons matter.
It’s been five years since my great-aunt and her husband rescued me from foster care — and since I discovered dragons exist.
For reals.
Yeah, I had a hard time believing it too, but now I’m learning what it means to be a dragon keeper — a human with special powers who acts as a sort of liaison between dragons and the unsuspecting human world.
When Uncle Max leaves town and entrusts me with my first case, I’m forced to enlist the help of the last five P.I.s on earth he’d want me to ask — his nephews. As much as I want to hate them for betraying Max, when we all finally meet face to face, the earth shakes with the instant connection between us.
And those powers I’m supposed to have? They seem to grow stronger the more time I spend with the devastatingly sexy dragon shifters.
But the confusing attraction I have for all five men will have to wait until we solve this mystery. That’s if we don’t stumble upon an even bigger one along the way.
Spoiler: We do!
The Spark of the Dragon’s Heart is the Book 1 in the Harem of Fire series. Find Book 2 here ➡ The Heat of the Dragon’s Heart
Find the FREE PREQUEL, The Glow of the Dragon’s Heart, on your favorite ebook retailer.
Chapter One
I bounce up and down in my booster seat, the tips of my toes just barely grazing the back of the passenger seat where Mommy is sitting. I know I’m not supposed to. Mommy and Daddy tell me all the time I need to sit still when we’re in the car, but sometimes I just feel so happy I can’t hold it in anymore.
My parents are holding hands across the armrest between them, giving each other that look. The gooey one they give each other sometimes that I pretend to gag over, but which secretly makes me happy inside. Then they lace their fingers together and Daddy raises her hand to his lips.
“Ew!” I cry, slapping my hands over my eyes, in case they decide to kiss.
“Just you wait, short stuff,” Daddy says, turning long enough to give me a smile and a wink. “One day you’ll fall in love, just like Mommy and me.”
“Nuh uh,” I snort and look out the window at the trees rushing by as the last of the sunset fades.
It’s getting really dark now. I blink in surprise when a black shadow moves across the sky. My parents stop talking and give each other funny looks. Daddy leans in close to the steering wheel to peer out of the windshield. Mommy does too.
Something catches my attention out of the corner of my eye. When I glance to the left, I forget to breathe. A very large, very round, very yellow eyeball with a thin black slit running down the middle is looking inside the car. It’s almost the size of the window itself, and it’s staring directly at me!
My parents are too busy looking out the windshield to notice, so I grin and wave at my new friend. No one ever told me birds could get so big. Except…the closer I look at it, the more I realize it doesn’t look like any bird I’ve ever seen. Birds have beaks, not leathery snouts. They have feathers, not scales. And they definitely don’t look like really big lizards.
I stretch out my little fingers in his direction, imagining what the scales and ridges and bumps on his skin feel like. His lips pull up into a smile, but the rows of gleaming white fangs scare me.
“It’s just a dream,” a voice whispers inside my head.
It doesn’t feel like a dream. It feels very real and very scary.
Then the eyeball blinks, and suddenly it’s not yellow, it’s orange. And just like that, I’m not afraid anymore. I love that eyeball, but I’m not sure why. The whispering voice reminds me that it’s Uncle Max, and that this dream changed when I went to live with him and Aunt Shirley, who love me like their own child. It won’t end the way it has since I was five, with my parents suffering a fiery fate.
Even though I don’t know what the voice is talking about, my little body is flooded with relief. I don’t like bad dreams, but I really like the lizard flying next to our car. He’s there to protect me. He’s my friend. I love him.
He blinks again and his eye goes back to yellow, and I want to scream, but I have no air in my lungs so I screw shut my eyes tight. When I open them again, I’m standing in a field, no longer a little girl.
I’m big now, a grownup.
A man stands near me. We’re both frightened, but we’re not frightened together. I don’t like the man very much, and he doesn’t like me, but he doesn’t scare me. I follow his upturned face and see vultures circling above us. Five of them. Now they scare me, even though they’re just vultures and I’m not roadkill.
The voice has nothing to say about this.
One of the vultures dives down, down, down, growing larger, larger, larger, until it almost fills the entire sky. It flies so close, I can see its eyes.
It screams. I scream. Then the man screams. The whole world screams and it feels like my brain is being stabbed with an ice pick. I look over at the man and reach my hand out to him. He reaches back. I may not like him, but I want to help him. Need to help him.
Something catches my eye and I look to the sky. What I see terrifies me, even though I don’t really know why. It’s just a bright spot of light, but the way it grows bigger and bigger terrifies me. I point at it, but before I can make a sound, the man is engulfed in a ball of fire.
And I scream.
I snorted myself awake in the middle of my Accounting 101 class. It took a moment for me to get my bearings and realize I wasn’t under attack from some scary-ass dragon. Judging by the way only the person sitting next to me is staring, I must not have actually screamed out loud this time. That was a relief, but I kicked myself for missing the last part of the lecture.
My best friend Zoe Walsman snickered and nudged me with her elbow. “Don’t tell me you’re still hung over from Saturday.”
I shushed her, but there wasn’t much point.
“That’s about it for today, class,” Professor Green said, dismissing us for the day. As we all packed up our laptops and textbooks, he added, “Remember to keep up with the auxiliary reading on the class website. See you Wednesday!”
Dr. Green looked as if he belonged on the set of a slapstick movie about college kids. Middle-aged, with a dad belly and a receding hairline? Check. Houndstooth blazer with elbow patches and black-rimmed glasses, both about twenty years out of style? Check. Crazy-bushy eyebrows that resembled black-and-gray caterpillars crawling across his forehead? Double check.
None of that could dim my admiration for the man, though. He was one hell of an accounting teacher. And that’s exactly wh
at I needed, after a childhood of being a foster kid, shuttled between less-than-stellar public schools. Those institutions had been little more than holding pens for kids while their parents worked two jobs just to put food on the table. Quite frankly, it was a miracle I could do simple addition, but Dr. Green had been patient with helping me learn the ins and outs of basic accounting practices.
Unlike when I was in high school, I really wanted to learn, which is why I hated dozing off in class like I did. My uncle-by-marriage, Max Novak, was paying for my continuing education at the local community college so I’d be better able to help him at his private investigation firm. He and Aunt Shirley — actually, my father’s aunt — had told me more times than I could count to stop thanking them for the private “scholarship,” claiming it was simply an investment in Maximus Investigations, but I knew better.
Since moving to Los Angeles five years ago to live with them, I’d always known when Max was trying to hide something from me. I don’t know how, but I could sense when he was lying, which is how I knew he actually wanted me to become the best possible version of myself. That and he thought I should hang out with people my own age, instead of crusty old curmudgeons like him.
Not that I minded hanging out with him and Aunt Shirley. I’d spent twelve interminable years in Oregon’s foster care system before they took me in. To say they saved my life would be an understatement.
Since then, I’d worked part-time in his office as a sort of apprentice-slash-paper pusher where I learned a bunch about running a business — among other things — while enrolling in as many business-related classes as possible. Sometimes those five years seemed like ages ago, but most of the time I still felt like a clueless kid.
That made sense, considering how ancient Uncle Max was. My meager twenty-two years on the planet were dwarfed by his own life of about a thousand years — give or take a couple of decades, he always joked. Apparently, dragons are exceptionally long-lived.
Oh, didn’t I mention Max is a dragon? Well, a dragon shifter, which is basically a human who can morph into a dragon. Or vice versa. Either way, he was a real-life, honest-to-god, fire-breathing dragon. I’d seen it with my own eyes a few times since I first learned the truth at the tender age of seventeen. As it turned out, Max was not only one of the oldest dragons still walking around the planet, he also led the west coast weir, which is basically just a pack of dragons.
No big deal.
Thankfully, I wasn’t surrounded by dragons all the time. I had a few female friends, and I also had Shirley. She was a human, just like me, only super old. Like, over a hundred, though she’d never admit her true age. Seems dragons sort of infect humans with long life. Kinda creepy, really, but Shirl didn’t seem to mind.
“Christ on a cracker, I thought he’d never shut up,” groaned Zoe, as she joined me in the aisle.
“Shh, he’ll hear you,” I whispered as I slung my cheap black backpack over my shoulder.
“Whatever, he’s oblivious. He didn’t even notice his star student napping. C’mon, let’s get out of here.”
Zoe had always hated school, but somehow I’d talked her into taking a few classes when she wasn’t working or auditioning. I figured higher education would only help her find better jobs between acting gigs, but she didn’t seem to care about school any more than when we were growing up together.
Zoe had been the only constant in my life after my parents died. If it hadn’t been for her dogged determination and bossy nature, we would have drifted apart more and more with each home I was placed in.
Growing up, we’d talked endlessly about moving to Hollywood and becoming famous actresses. For me, it was just fantasy — a way to cope with being a faceless number in the foster care system — but Zoe was pursuing her dream with the same dedication that had kept us connected, despite the odds. With her dazzling green eyes, dark brown curls, and petite frame, she looked every part the budding actress, but she was also a rabidly loyal friend.
I still couldn’t get over the fact she’d made good on her promise to move out of her parents’ home in Oregon to live in a cramped apartment in a sketchy part of Los Angeles. “Culver City adjacent,” she called it. I called it a pit. If anyone could make it in this gritty, unforgiving town, it would be her.
Our friends Yazmin Hernandez and Alisha Taylor stood at the end of the aisle, waiting for us. Yazmin linked arms with Alisha and Zoe, while I slipped my arm into Zoe’s, grateful to be part of such smart and amazing group of women.
“Okay, you know that guy who sits next to Alisha?” Yazmin asked. “The one with the spiked hair a la Nick Carter, circa 2005?”
Yazmin was such a sweet and patient person that she rarely made snarky quips like that. It took a lot to piss her off, which meant her story had to be good.
“Oh god,” Zoe said, “I think his name is actually Carter, isn’t it?”
Yazmin smiled wide. “You got it. You probably haven’t noticed because you sit down the row, but he’s pretty much been copying off Alisha all term.”
“That’s so uncool,” I said, leading the way through the main doors and out into the nearly omnipresent Southern California sun.
“Are you going to bust his ass to Green?” Zoe asked.
Alisha shrugged, unconcerned. “I thought about it, but you know how much I hate drama.”
That didn’t seem like the rule-following, hard-working, pay-your-dues Alisha I knew. Then her dark eyes caught mine and I saw a glimmer of amusement in them.
“Oh no, what did you do?” I asked, unable to stop myself from smiling, even though I had no idea what had happened.
“I was just sick of it, you know? And sure enough, I spotted him peeking at my notes today. My notes! Who on earth would bother copying someone else’s notes as the lecture is, you know, happening?”
“Jackass,” Zoe sighed.
“He was trying to be all sneaky, stretching and leaning back so he could get a better look at my screen. My solution was to type I SEE YOU, ASSHOLE! in all caps.”
Zoe hooted her approval. “Did it work?”
Yaz nodded vigorously. “You should have seen his face. It went all red, then he scooted farther away from her. I don’t think he’ll try cheating off her anymore.”
“I’m honestly kind of confused that he thought I was smart enough to copy, yet dumb enough to not notice him creeping on my notes,” Alisha added, tossing her long black braids over her shoulder.
Alisha was drop-dead gorgeous — flawless dark skin, perfect black braids, and a trim athletic body from years of running — and whip-smart. She’d been valedictorian at her surprisingly competitive public high school and aced every college class she took. We all knew she’d eventually move on to a four-year college and eventually pursue a law degree, just as she’d wanted for most of her life.
That didn’t mean she only studied. Weeknights were off-limits because she either had classes in the mornings or went to her part-time job as a receptionist at a law firm, but she always tried to come out with us on weekends.
“Did you notice Teacher’s Pet nodding off at the end of class?” Zoe said, shooting me an amused grin. “She’s still hung over from Saturday.”
“I am not! I was just…tired.”
“I suspect a whole lot of people are still hung over today,” Alisha said.
“That party night was totes insane, right?” Zoe said with a nostalgic sigh. “I don’t even remember everything that happened. I guess I had too much of that hunch punch stuff.”
“Oh, you definitely did,” Yaz agreed, teasing her gently. “Do you remember volunteering to do a keg stand?”
“No, I didn’t!” Zoe gasped, her green eyes going wide. “Did I?”
I nodded. “You tried. Yaz and I managed to stop you before your skirt fell over your head.”
“That’s nothing,” Alisha said, giving Yaz a sly smile. “Little miss Yazmin here did a jello shot, even though she’s underage.”
“Hey, in my defense, I didn’t know a
jello shot had alcohol in it. I just thought it was…dessert.”
Zoe pinched Yazmin’s cheek. “Oh, you sweet naïve little angel. Don’t worry, we won’t tattle on you.”
“Besides, I’ll be twenty-one in April,” Yaz added, kind of like a little kid saying she was five and three-quarters.
We all loved Yazmin’s innocence, mostly because we’d lost a lot of our own already. She was only a year behind than the rest of us, but sometimes she seemed even younger with her sweet nature and mind-boggling naïveté. Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t smart, because she was. But despite the attention her pretty face — complete with mile-deep dimples — and hourglass figure earned her, she was charmingly shy.
Having grown up in a strict Catholic household, she tended to wear loose-fitting, demure outfits — unless she went out on the town with us. Nothing really revealing, like the mini dresses Zoe preferred, but she’d learned how to relax and cut loose a little while still maintaining her personal beliefs.
As we reached our cars — we all drove separately, as does everyone in L.A., apparently — Zoe suggested we all continue our chat at a nearby coffee shop.
I cringed. “Sorry, guys. Uncle Max wasn’t very impressed by my stumbling in at four in the morning, then sleeping all damn day. I need to get to the office and answer phones.”
“I still can’t believe he has a rotary phone in his office,” Zoe said.
“For your information, I finally got him to update to push-button phones.”
They all looked shocked my technophobe uncle had made the leap into the 1980s. I’d given them a tour of the office once and Yaz had said it was like stepping back in time.
